Golan Levin: Welcome back every­one. I just want­ed to bring all the artists who’ve spo­ken this evening—Andy Malone, Cherisse Datu, Latoya Peterson, Lexa Walsh, Shawn Pierre, and Vi Trinh. Thanks every­one so much for com­ing and join­ing me up here. 

So I’m gonna kick it off with maybe an intro­duc­to­ry ques­tion, and I’d just love to hear your answers. And I guess my first ques­tion is, how do you see your work dif­fer­ent­ly now, in the con­text of the full group presentation? 

Andy Malone: I was real­ly glad we had this event today. Because I feel like I learned a lot about not only fel­low artists but also about the amend­ments that the they were work­ing on. This was great for com­mu­ni­ty build­ing, and also I feel like we’re now— Or at least I’ll speak for myself. It feels a lit­tle more cohe­sive as far as how my work and how I’m think­ing about the amend­ment, and how I see every­one’s got a dif­fer­ent take in how they’re think­ing about the amend­ment in dif­fer­ent medi­ums and dif­fer­ent ways of doing it. I can see how it all comes togeth­er now and it’s pret­ty cool. I’m not sure if that was the ques­tion you intend­ed, Golan, but.

Levin: Yeah, sure. How about some­one else? How do you see your work dif­fer­ent­ly in the con­text of the full group pre­sen­ta­tion? Or how has— Where has it tak­en you?

Lexa Walsh: I’ll chime in. Yeah, I’m just sort of amazed and blown away by the diver­si­ty of approach­es. And it makes me real­ize that my approach, although it is crit­i­cal it’s com­ing from this place of play and fun as an intro­duc­tion to the crit­i­cal, and it might not appear that way from the out­side. And some peo­ples’ are sort of deep from the get-go. But in a way I think that’s going to be this inter­est­ing approach for the audi­ences to come and engage. And there’s some­thing for every­one to dig into. 

Vi Trinh: Yeah. As the per­son who self-proclaimed has the most use­less amend­ment, I think it’s nice that the rest of the projects sort of uphold this more sort of…somewhat more seri­ous and actu­al­ly tack­ling the issue instead of I sup­pose tak­ing a sharp left turn into absur­dist sci-fi fic­tion. And I feel like we’ve all been teas­ing each oth­er with our games for the past year, because we’ve been work­ing on this project for a long time. And it’s so excit­ing to see how far every­one’s work has come along and real­ly crys­tal­lized into these fully-realized and indi­vid­ual pieces that are dif­fer­ent from each oth­er but have so much con­nec­tion between them. 

I see also a lot of con­nec­tions between the work and research that I’ve been doing and every­one else’s as well, and it’s very excit­ing to see. I can’t wait to see them all togeth­er in the con­text of the space. 

Cherisse Datu: Yeah. I want to just add that… I don’t know if we should fight for the most use­less amend­ment. Or that be a sur­vey at the end of the expe­ri­ence. But I def­i­nite­ly want peo­ple leav­ing with like, a sense of humor and also a sense of hope and a sense of chang. And I think that’s kind of the hard bit with every­thing, is going like this is the doc­u­ment we refer to, but who are we… Like for exam­ple in the Fourth Amendment text, ​“per­sons.” And so who are per­sons, you know? So it’s just… I don’t wan­na fight over what the most use­less amend­ment is, but I think mine could prob­a­bly give yours a run for [indis­tinct].

Levin: I think anoth­er ques­tion I have— I mean, col­lec­tive­ly this group—and there’s anoth­er group tomor­row evening as well. There’s anoth­er five artists pre­sent­ing tomor­row night. But col­lec­tive­ly, there’s many dif­fer­ent approach­es to the Bill of Rights that you’ve each tak­en. And you know, some of you have tak­en more expres­sive approach­es that sort of just kind of are inspired by the amend­ment you’re work­ing with. Others of the artists are work­ing more in a way where you the play­er are put into a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion and are sort of made to sort of feel per­haps what it’s like to be in a sit­u­a­tion where that amend­ment applies and impinges on you. I won­der, have you seen any approach­es in game­play in anoth­er artist’s work here this evening that you now want to emu­late or bor­row for your own future work?

Trinh: Andy’s pieces looks so much fun. And I’ve been work­ing on sculp­tures of my own. It’s very new. I’ve nev­er done sculp­ture before, but now I’m ready to hop into it and real­ly make those pieces. Yeah, there’s some­thing real­ly phys­i­cal about the way your work is, Andy, that I find extreme­ly fun. It’s very lovely.

Malone: Aw, thank you Vi. I appre­ci­ate that. And on my end, I’m in awe of the elec­tron­ics and the pro­gram­ming. Everyone that does that stuff with­out even…you know, it’s no big deal for pro­gram­mers to do it but I would love to learn that and love to incor­po­rate that into my work.

Levin: I like par­tic­u­lar­ly in Shawn’s project and approach, which…it’s almost like it’s a game that’s real­ly best played by peo­ple who know each oth­er very well. And this idea that you know some­one’s tells, and so try­ing to see if each oth­er are lying is…there’s a rich psy­cho­log­i­cal space that Shawn is lever­ag­ing in your work there that I think is real­ly impor­tant, sort of inter­per­son­al space.

Shawn Pierre: Yeah, it’s…it’s a prob­lem I have, where I like see­ing peo­ple mess with each oth­er. I need to fig­ure out why I keep doing that. But yeah, it’s real­ly one of my favorite things about mak­ing inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ences, is watch­ing the play­er sto­ries that hap­pen not just dur­ing the game but what hap­pens after­wards and see­ing they’re inter­ac­tions and the con­ver­sa­tions they have, and what just comes of the entire expe­ri­ence. And then maybe they think they can go about doing the whole thing again, play it dif­fer­ent­ly and have a whole new sto­ry to tell. 

But that’s the thing I also like about every­thing else here. Everything allows for so much play­er expres­sion dur­ing and after­wards, where every­one does walk away with some­thing. That feels unique. That feels spe­cial. That they feel like this whole exhib­it was some­thing that was tai­lored to them, because they’re able to make some­thing so per­son­al or get involved in some­thing so personal.

So I think that’s super impres­sive, that every­one was able to do that. And it makes me real­ly inspired to even con­tin­ue work­ing on this and maybe change things up just to embody some more of the spir­it that every­one else has into my work.

Trinh: I think also the sort of sim­i­lar­i­ties between Shawn and Lexa’s pieces that I kind of want to embody the next time I make games is that the inter­ac­tion is less with the game in and of itself and more with the oth­er peo­ple who are play­ing with you. And I think that’s amaz­ing because it adds extra life to it and it can change every sin­gle time. And instead of fight­ing against I sup­pose these large immov­able sys­tems, they become more human and more inter­per­son­al. Yeah. Next time for me.

Levin: Well, I think this is a real­ly good time to kind of bring things to a close. I want to thank all of the artists who are here and who pre­sent­ed this evening for shar­ing your work so gen­er­ous­ly. You’ve got just a cou­ple more months to kind of tidy up your instal­la­tion for the pre­sen­ta­tion at Federal Hall Memorial in New York City, the birth­place of the Constitution. Your game will be pre­sent­ed on July 4^th. So we’re real­ly look­ing for­ward to that. 

And I just want to kind of announce who we will be see­ing tomor­row evening at the same time, 5:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. We will have Peter Bradley; Broken Ghost and Moaw!—which is Arnab Chakravarty, Ian McNeely, and MeeNa Ko—so we’re real­ly look­ing for­ward to their pre­sen­ta­tion, great col­lab­o­ra­tion; Danielle Isadora Butler; Ryan Kuo; and arts​.codes, which is Melissa F. Clarke and Margaret Schedel. So those will be our pre­sen­ters tomor­row evening. And once again we will also have a Q&A or bit of a group dis­cus­sion at the end of the day tomorrow. 

Thanks again, every­one, and see you tomorrow.